List of all blog posts. Alternatively, see see posts by category or search for specific posts.
October 17, 2024
I've used a reverse proxy to access my self-hosted apps and services for years, but I recently re-did everything from scratch and decided to write it down. When done, we'll be able to access our apps and services through a custom domain, with unique sub-domains for each app or service, with full HTTPS and accessible only locally.
September 25, 2024
Tailscale is my new homelab toy. I've been using it to access my media on the go, to connect to a VPS for sharing my Plex library with family, and now with on-the-go adblocking on my phone, tablet and laptop. Here's how.
September 3, 2024
I wrote before about securely exposing Plex for external access, but my previous solution relied on Cloudflare Tunnel and it was technically against their TOS. So I switched to using a Oracle VM on their free-tier, connecting it to my home network with Tailscale, and exposing Plex via reverse proxy. It works like a charm!
July 15, 2024
Exposing Plex normally involves port forwarding from the router, which is very insecure and not recommended. If your home network is behind CGNAT - very common with most ISPs nowadays -- you can't even port forward if you wanted to. Here's how I did it in a fairly secure way that limits access by using Cloudflare.
June 25, 2024
Accessing self-hosted services from outside the home is a challenge for many, and can be complex to manage, but Tailscale makes it easy to set up a VPN between your phone (or laptop, or any other device outside your network) and your homelab, securely and without opening ports on your router.
May 31, 2024
I'm running almost 30 containers on my home server at this point, and I'm extremely lazy when it comes to updating them. Watchtower is a lightweight set-it-and-forget-it solution to auto-updating containers, and it even has built-in notifications. Here's how to set it up.
March 26, 2024
I've written about file managers for Android before, recently I found X-plore which makes it very easy to transfer files back and forth between Android and SMB network shares, once you understand how the UI works. Here's how I set that up.
March 17, 2024
When working on a GitHub repo from different Linux hosts, I encountered an "insufficient permission" error when using git commands. Here is the solution that worked for me from StackOverflow.
March 11, 2024
My situation was simple -- I have on my home server a 2 TB hard drive for media storage that was filling up, and I wanted to add a second drive, but not have to keep track of which drive specific files were in. Enter mergerfs, an open source "union filesystem" that lets you merge multiple storage drives into one mount point.
March 3, 2024
Home Assistant is an open source home automation solution that gives you local control over your smart home. It can also be run on Libre Computer's boards, but I ran into some issues following the official instructions from Libre, so here's how I got it working.
February 28, 2024
Something a little different. Not a guide, just thoughts and opinions about a recent controversy over Netlify, and a decision about the site I made as a result.
December 29, 2023
Self-hosting a static web blog has never been easier thanks to Cloudflare Tunnel. In this guide I explain how to expose a static website hosted on machine inside my network to the internet using Nginx as webserver and securing it with various free Cloudflare services.
November 2, 2023
I've been wanting to get a Raspberry Pi for ages, but they were out of stock for the longest time, so I never ended up with one. Recently I learned about the Le Potato from Libre Computer as a Pi-alternative, and after some research paid the $30 early access price for their new Sweet Potato SBC. Here's how I set it up.
November 1, 2023
Setting up SMB shares is fairly easy, but I do it so infrequently I often forget the steps and need to look them up anyway. So I made myself two sets of smb config files for quickly setting up shares, either public or with a login required.
August 10, 2023
I've run Pi-Hole bare metal for years and recently decided to run a secondary instance of Pi-Hole on another machine as a Docker container. Gravity Sync keeps them updated with all the same DNS records, block lists, etc. Here's how I set it up.
July 30, 2023
I've been using OpenMediaVault 6 for over a year now, and it's user interface can be a bit obtuse, so I wrote myself a series of quick step-by-step guides for enabling certain features within the OMV workbench UI.
July 27, 2023
Configs necessary for Pi-Hole to use either Cloudflared or Unbound as forwarding resolver to Quad9 using DNS over TLS.
July 20, 2023
Cloudflare Tunnels have been around for a few years and are well regarded alternatives for VPNs or port-forwarding on a router. They are often used to expose access to self-hosted apps from outside the local network with minimal config or hassle. Here's how it's done.
July 15, 2023
My scenario was simple: I wanted to access the web GUIs of OpenMediaVault, Plex and Navidrome via a URL like plex.home.arpa without having to remember IPs and ports, inside my home network only and without the need for SSL/HTTPS. Nothing fancy, nothing accessible from outside my house. Here's how I did that with Nginx Proxy Manager as the reverse proxy and Pi-Hole as the DNS.
July 13, 2023
When using Pi-Hole as a network-wide ad blocker, your DNS requests still go out in plain text and can be seen by your ISP. DNS over HTTPS encrypts DNS requests between your Pi-Hole and the upstream DNS resolver. Here is a quick guide on how to set that up with Cloudflared daemon.
July 7, 2023
Google Photos began limiting free storage back in 2021, limiting you to 15 GB of storage when uploading photos in their original size uncompressed. Rather than wait and see if I hit the cap, I decided to try replacing Google Photos with a self-hosted solution. Here's how I did it.
July 4, 2023
Normally a Samba share will require login with a username and password, but sometimes you just want anyone on the network to access a specific share without needing to worry about that. Here's a quick and easy way of making a (fairly insecure) Samba share available to anyone on your local network.
July 3, 2023
Commands necessary to delete partitions, wipe a disk completely and install a new filesystem.
December 3, 2022
Sometimes I use laptops in the home lab, and to save myself on a few watts of power usage I use these terminal commands to turn off the display, then just SSH into it from my PC.
November 25, 2022
Configure an Ubuntu machine to autologin and go straight into the terminal on boot.
November 19, 2022
I'd been meaning to play around with Deno and finally got around to doing it in the quickest, easiest (and laziest) way possible -- using a minimal blog template. I also took the opportunity to learn how Deno Deploy works. The whole thing is quick and painless, here's how to do it.
November 7, 2022
There are many File Managers/File Explorers on the Google Play Store, but I wanted to easily access the Samba share on my server while on my home network. Solid Explorer is the solution I went with and it works well, so here is a quick guide to setting it up.
November 4, 2022
FileBrowser is a self-hosted file manager for a specified directory in a Linux machine that lets you upload, download, move, copy, create, delete, rename, and edit your files in a nice web interface through your browser. Here's a quick guide to setting it up in Docker.
October 30, 2022
Generating and using a GPG key is not difficult, but every time I need to remember how to do it to sign my commits from a new machine, I need to go through several pages of explanation on GitHub. So I made myself a terse and concise one-page quick guide, here it is.
October 29, 2022
Network File Share or NFS allows sharing directories between Linux hosts on the same network, similar to Samba though it has better performance with small and medium-sized files comparatively. Here's a quick guide on setting up an NFS share between Linux hosts.
October 20, 2022
When running a headless home server, you may want to set up a monitoring solution to keep track of your server's performance. Node Exporter will expose your server's metrics, cAdvisor will expose metrics for Docker containers, and Prometheus will scrape and collect those metrics, which is then used as a data source for Grafana dashboards. Here's how to get it all set up in Docker.
October 18, 2022
Though Plex is a very popular media server for self-hosting, some open source enthusiasts prefer to use an alternative since Plex Media Server is not open source. A nice, simpler and admittedly less pretty alternative is Jellyfin. This guide will show you how to run it in Docker container.
October 17, 2022
One of the most popular services to self-host in Plex Media Server, which serves your personal media library with a nice Netflix-like UI. Though you can install and run it bare-metal, the most common and easiest way is in a Docker container. Here's how.
October 14, 2022
If you want your Linux machine to stay up-to-date on important security updates, but you don't want to SSH into it all the time to run updates and would rather set it and forget it, this is the way.
October 9, 2022
I'm much more comfortable using Bash over PowerShell, but there are definitely times that you need to use command line on Windows. So I keep a small, but growing list of my most commonly used cmdlets, their Linux-like aliases, and other must-know commands.
October 8, 2022
Just a quick guide to format and partition hard drives in Linux command line that I wrote for myself a long time ago, and recently had to reference again.
Besides just using a browser extension for ad blocking, I've been using Pi-Hole for years to prevent all devices on my network from getting ads, and stopping smart home devices from phoning home for telemetry and tracking. Pi-Hole will run on almost anything that can run Linux, is very easy to set up, and super effective with the right ad lists.
October 7, 2022
Debian's non-graphical install does not give you the option to set a static IP, here's a quick guide to doing it manually on the command line.
October 6, 2022
Most of my experience with Linux is via the Ubuntu distribution, which includes sudo as a default. Debian does not have sudo or superuser accounts, here's how to add it and set it up.
October 5, 2022
Although I love using Netlify to host my site, for testing out sites and simple apps I have fallen in love with Surge.sh, a ridiculously simple web hosting solution that works entirely from the command line.
October 4, 2022
I sometimes use old laptops in my home lab when I want to test anything on Linux, and I prefer to keep them closed so they take up less space. A few quick commands will keep the laptop even on with the lid closed.
October 1, 2022
While I use Zsh with Oh-My-Zsh for making my Linux terminal pretty, it's not available for Windows. Luckily it's brother from another mother Oh-My-Posh basically does the same thing for Windows Terminal and PowerShell.
September 29, 2022
I've been running a bunch of services on my home server in docker containers for a few years now. It's quick and easy to set up once you get used to it. Here's a quick and dirty guide to installing Docker and Docker Compose, and getting several containers up and running.
September 26, 2022
Using the Secure Copy (SCP) utility in Linux lets you securely copy files to and from remote hosts, and it's very easy to use.
September 20, 2022
Markdown can render A LOT of characters and symbols using specific 'entities', and can do other things like render tables, so I made myself a list of common or handy, but easy-to-forget markdown hacks based off the official Markdown Guide.
September 18, 2022
Just a quick cheat sheet of basic and slightly less basic Linux commands, as well as handy keyboard shortcuts, that I maintain for myself since I can't always remember them all.
September 17, 2022
Whenever I use Vim to edit files on Linux, I need to relearn how to use it. Years ago I found a thread on Stack Overflow with two simple and extremely useful answers that helped me make sense of Vim. So here it is.
September 9, 2022
I wanted to style my <kbd> element to look like a keyboard, and a google search took me to someone else's blog post that had a nice bit of code and invited others to steal it. So I did.
September 3, 2022
Ansible is an IT tool that enables Infrastructure as Code, letting you automate provisioning, configuration, management and deployment of services and applications. I like using it at a fraction of it's full power to bootstrap fresh installs of Linux for my homelab.
April 20, 2022
How to use sudo command in Linux without the password prompt, by adding a line to the sudoers file.
January 7, 2022
Frameworks and libraries are great and all, but sometimes you just want to make a simple website with only HTML, CSS and JavaScript — maybe without the latter even. When making a PWA, it’s common to use a framework like Vue or a library like Workbox, which requires a bundler like Webpack. In truth, that’s completely unnecessary!
December 4, 2021
I've been getting more and more comfortable working on the command line in Linux, and looked into ways to pretty it up and make it more user friendly. Enter Zsh, an alternative to Bash shell, and the Oh-My-Zsh framework used to customize the terminal experience to your heart's content. Here's my basic set up.
October 18, 2021
PrismJS is great for making code blocks look pretty, it comes with a set of several themes out of the box, and there's also many more additional themes available as a separate package on NPM and Yarn. But what if none of those matches the color scheme of your website? With Nuxt you can easily use a custom CSS file to make your code blocks perfectly match the overall look of your site or blog. Here's how.
October 8, 2021
The excellent Nuxt/Sitemap module can automatically generate a new sitemap.xml at each build, and you can set either static and/or dynamic routes in it's config. It can also auto-generate routes to your blog posts (or whatever other content) fetched and displayed in a slug file, so a new post shows up with the correct route in the sitemap when created. Here's a quick and simple guide for Nuxt/Sitemap to generate routes to your Nuxt/Content blog posts, whether static or SSR.
September 21, 2021
Setting up SSH keys and pushing to GitHub without needing to enter a username and password has always been a good practice, but now that GitHub is deprecating basic username and password authentication, it's past time to get this set up if you haven't already. It's pretty simple and only takes a few minutes, here's the quick and dirty instructions.
September 17, 2021
I was having some issue getting this to work on a static (not SSR) site made with Nuxt, and although I read through a bunch of blog articles, most of them seemed to be missing some piece of information or other that made it not work for me. After mixing and matching some of the instructions, and combining the useful info with the official Nuxt documentation, I finally did all the necessary steps and got it to work. So here's a clear, succinct guide to using Prism.js in a Nuxt static site.
September 15, 2021
Rsync is a very handy tool for doing high-speed file transfers between Linux hosts over a local network or remote hosts on the internet, such as EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services. You can pass options to Rsync to do things like recursive transfer (all files and sub-directories within the source directory are also transferred), ignore existing or newer files at the destination, and more.
September 13, 2021
When using Linux headless, such as via SSH or with no desktop environment, accessing a newly installed hard drive (not just external USB drives, but additional internal HDDs too) is not obvious, and most people end up having to Google it. I know I did. So let's have a quick and dirty guide on how.
September 12, 2021
Secure Shell is a protocol for securely connecting from one computer to another. As a web developer, you will probably end up using SSH a lot, and even if you don't it's a handy skill to have. Here's a quick guide on how to generate SSH keys and copy them to other machines.
September 9, 2021
Getting started learning Amazon Web Services can be a bit intimidating. Once you've created your free account there's so many services on the AWS console that it can be overwhelming and confusing to figure out where to get started. So let's ease our way and start by just hosting a simple static website with AWS Amplify, it only takes a few minutes!
September 8, 2021
When I was learning Git, in order to avoid giant articles and get right to the commands I needed reminding of, I made myself a cheat sheet that plainly and succinctly explained each Git command. Here is that quick and dirty guide of Git commands that you will likely use often as a web developer.
September 6, 2021
So you're learning web development, building things locally and only ever seeing your site or app when you run it on your computer. But how do you get this thing online so you can make sure it works on the interwebs? How do you learn headers, content-security-policy and CORS without having a site hosted online to work with? And how to do it FOR FREE?
September 1, 2021
A quick and dirty guide on how to easily set up a Samba share on Linux that can be accessed from Windows PCs on the same network.
August 31, 2021
I have a Sony Bravia 4K TV and it is awesome. It has built-in Android TV so you can use Android apps on your TV, but not every app is available, and one of those is DirecTV Stream -- necessary to view live TV from my cable provider, AT&T, without need for a separate set-top box. So here's how to sideload the DirecTV Stream app on Sony Bravia TVs without using the Google Play Store.
July 9, 2021
How to copy SSH keys between Linux hosts and from Windows to Linux.